Windtower in Dubai: View more photos by clicking the imageHigh oil prices and warnings about global warming have had an effect on the construction industry. These days, architects and developers are more likely to consider a new building's 'environmental footprint.' That's the impact a building and its systems have on the environment.

For example, how much energy is required to air-condition the structure? That's the question some researchers in California pondered as they designed a new home for their department. The World's Alex Gallafent picks up the story.

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And it was important that that home met certain criteria.

FIELD: "Premier among those was a building that had a small environmental footprint, used recycled materials, was energy efficient and used traditional approaches wherever possible."

Chris Field is the director of Stanford's Department of Global Ecology. He says one challenge had to do with Palo Alto's climate. It's kind of Mediterranean. They get rainy winters, but hot dry summers. And that meant finding clever ways of keeping the place cool. Stanford's design team found part of their answer a long way away in the Middle East.

In an old part of Dubai called Bastakiya, workers chip and scrape at stone. These construction workers aren't putting up new buildings. They're restoring old ones, houses constructed before the introduction of electricity. Rashad Mohammed Bukhash grew up here.

BUKHASH: "In this room we studied Koran - I was 5 or 6 years old - there more than 20 students in here, sitting here from 9am to 12pm."

It's a small room. And in Dubai's desert climate, twenty people in one room for three hours means a lot of heat. But even without electricity, the students stayed cool. That's thanks to the building's unique form of air-conditioning. A windtower. Bukhash wants to show me the inner workings of one. But there's a problem.

BUKHASH: "They've got plastic up there. Today they have it closed up because of the rain. Hopefully they can get someone to open it."

Soon the plastic is off, and the windtower is open. From the inside, it looks like wide chimney. Only it's not connected to a fireplace. It's poking down through the ceiling of the living room.

BUKHASH: "You can notice it - the air is moving."

The concept is simple. The windtower is a four-sided structure, with openings on all sides and a small roof at the top. It's designed to capture the wind from whichever direction it's blowing. The tower's inside space is partitioned all the way down so that air can flow in different directions. So - the wind blows and is scooped into one side of the tower. A pressure differential is created. The cool air is sucked in on one side and the warm air is sucked out on the other. And that cools the space below. Sometimes dramatically so.

John Alexander Smith teaches interior design at the American University of Dubai. He remembers his first time standing underneath a windtower.

SMITH: "Outside it was something like 40 odd degrees Celsius. Inside it was about 10 degrees. Unbelievable - I really felt chilled."

Translation - 104 degrees Fahrenheit outside. A cool 50 degrees inside. And there are side effects, too.

SMITH: "I could hear people having conversations in other parts of the city."

BUKHASH: "Collecting the sound."

SMITH: "Absolutely, and this is one of the unexpected treasures of these traditional architectural features - they really do tune into the environment."

BUKHASH: "You know, even the thieves enter in from the windtowers because that was the only open area, that's why in many of the towers they've kept steel cages so the thieves will not come through. In fact my grandfather, his house was robbed through the windtower."

Up on the roof, windtowers grace the tops of houses throughout the Bastakiya district. They look a bit like bell-towers. They're a dark golden brown mostly. But some have colorful patterns painted on them. And Rashad Bukhash says others are decorated with traditional Islamic designs.

BUKHASH: "...the idea is to combine the earth and the heaven, the man and the god."

In some versions of the windtower, wind is directed past water to augment the cooling effect. If the environment is already humid, that doesn't work. That's the case in Dubai, which sits on the coast of the Persian Gulf. But the water method is good in dry areas like central Iran, where the windtowers were originally conceived.

And it's good in parts of California.

FIELD: "Because the air's so dry there's a tremendous potential for evaporating moisture and for getting a lot of cooling out of this evaporation."

Chris Field at Stanford and his colleagues at the Global Ecology lab enhanced the design for THEIR tower by combining wind ...with gravity.

FIELD: "We spray a mist of water droplets into the top of the tower, and as they evaporate the air cools because the evaporation takes energy from the air. This cool air is denser than the surrounding air so that it falls in the tower; we're using gravity to drive the downward flow of air through the tower. When it reaches the bottom its cooler as a result of the evaporation and it floods the building with this flow of cool air."

On hot days, the breeze at the bottom of Stanford's windtower is about 20 to 30 degrees cooler than the temperature outside. Best thing is - it uses just a few gallons of water a day, and greatly reduces the need for electricity. The Stanford windtower doesn't take care of all of the building's air-conditioning needs.

But it makes a significant contribution.

It's not so surprising that an ancient Middle Eastern design could inspire contemporary architecture.

John Alexander Smith of the American University of Dubai says - in a way - the hard work's already been done when it comes to windtowers.

SMITH: "They've evolved over many hundreds of years. Evolution allows things to become perfected. It's trying to produce a revolutionary design that's always the problem - especially for today's architects."

But those lessons from the past have mostly been forgotten in Dubai itself. This city-state is rushing to become a 21st century metropolis.

In one new hotel and shopping complex, the Madinet Jumeirah, countless golden windtowers adorn the skyline. It's an Arabian Nights architectural fantasy. A fantasy, because these windtowers are purely decorative, says Smith.

SMITH: "We're in a hurry to create all these marvelous structures, wonderful buildings as visual statements. But we now need to start thinking very quickly about environmentally responsible buildings and low energy systems. This has to come in the next few years and I think that will be a really exciting part of Dubai's evolution."

For The World, I'm Alex Gallafent, Dubai.